Sunday, 21 May 2017

Unravelling the strong and stable delusion

Queenie Theresa's assumptions are clear - whatever mud she throws at opponents will stick and will the echo chamber of the far right media will reverberate with orgasmic pleasure at every manifestation of the unravelling of democracy. The assault on opposition leaders, be it the ineptitude of Corbyn, the competence of Sturgeon or the emerging and evolving politics of Tim Farron, is predictable and tedious, but to date has been effective.

As a tactician, May, or at least Lynton Crosby, to whom she acts as a malleable if squelchy Sooty, chose the right moment to go to the electorate. The quantity of shit that is going to hit the ventilation system over the next two years is multiplied and ripened by the folly of Brexit, and it is already clear that the groups who have trooped, often against their self-interest, to the Tory and UKIP colours will be bearing the brunt of the catastrophic economic miscalculation that May has embraced and encouraged. The dementia tax would, if applied correctly, raise an awfully large sum of money from those who demonstrate their idiocy by following the Tory shepherds straight into a medieval abattoir.

There is an economic storm unresolved from a decade ago, which is coming back to bite over the next two years - irrespective of the cretinous impact of David Davis and his scrofulous baboons in Europe. Consumer spending, house price inflation and the splurge on credit are never effective fundamentals, especially in an economy that is deliberately being withdrawn from a trading bloc which has delivered significant benefits over the last four decades. A treasonable betrayal.

With inflation now outstripping wages, and yet more draconian and ill-considered cutbacks to the social security system, there is not an encouraging prospect to be seen. Debt will either have to be written off, which is, quite frankly, rewarding the feckless and subsidising misplaced commercial decisions by a banking sector totally unchastened by its propagation of the current depression, or there will be misery on a scale hitherto unseen. The asset bubble will extend this into the Tory heartlands - unsupportable debt and collapsing asset prices, especially housing, will create a multiplier effect that, managed with the panache and competence that the current administration has demonstrated, will resemble a tsunami.

Those capable of inductive reasoning, and with a knowledge of economic and political history, will recognise that cut-and-run is May's rational response to buy time - hoping that the memory of the self-inflicted disaster will have faded more by 2022 than it would have done in 2020. The attention span of the electorate is anticipated to be short - the rancid hypocrisy and self-interest around education and health will have become yet another part of the polluted hum that surrounds this venal and seditious government.

Whether the reduction in the Tory lead that some opinion polls are pointing to is more than just a sampling blip remains to be seen. The opposition needs to be focusing on the harm and the stupidity of Tory proposals - it is telling that Corbyn's manifesto, which aligns rather more closely to the SDP's technocratic optimism of the 1980s than the Bennite suicide note of 1983, is being portrayed as some kind of Marxist coup rather than a rebalance towards basic democratic socialism.

For the last three decades, Tory and Labour leaders have been to promote the idea that politics is about protecting interest groups. May has deserted her own dupes, assuming that they cannot shift elsewhere, while attempting to play for the UKIP delusion. It was instructive to watch the ITV debate where May was not missed because at every stage the odious, fascist, liar Nuttall was uttering statements that it was entirely possible to imagine everything he said emanating straight from one of May's many mendacious orifices.

The opposition message has to move away from "something for nothing", which is the standard snake oil, to assaulting the Tory reality of "nothing for something", where public services are emasculated and attacked without creating either the opportunities the Tories lie about or the social cohesion that they profess to desire. The Tories are, at the smarter end of the range, smug hypocrites and canting dummies. The rest of them are patsies, willing colluders in their own demise. The opposition is coming to recognise that honesty around the price of a social system that is not mired in the new right's fascism needs to be spelt out.

For me, and I suspect many others, there are a number of key issues. Brexit remains centre stage, and the fixing rather than the dismantling of democracy in the British Isles is vital. However, in the next two weeks focusing on Tory lies, deception and their theft of the nation's birthright is a necessary last throw of the dice before the nations are thrust into outer darkness. May consistently invokes the "will of the people", "strong and stable" and the "enemy within". Her role model ended as a delusional drug addict in a bunker, hoping for miracles before the inevitable end. This should be a salutary lesson.